The Why-stripping construction consists of why and a remnant but conveys the same propositional content as fully sentential source, inducing form-meaning mismatch. Similar to other ellipsis phenomena such as sluicing, the construction thus allows to unexpress clausal material, but the unexpressed, elided material needs to be recovered in a proper way. This paper discusses two different approaches for the analysis of the Why-stripping in English and Korean: ellipsis and direct interpretation approaches. Discussing several key empirical facts, the paper argues for a direct interpretation (DI) approach, couched upon the framework of Construction-based HPSG and an independently motivated theory of dialogue context.
1. Introduction
2. Some basic properties
3. Arguments for deletion approaches
4. Arguments against Deletion Approaches
5. A Direct Interpretation approach
6. Conclusion
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